My first patent, which I filed during my time in IBM over the summer of 2005, is now available via Google patent search. It’s pretty dry, but that’s the nature of these things. 
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Entries tagged with “patents”.
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- Design Language News: Lawsuits in Mobile business
- Google responds to Oracle's Android patent lawsuit, we break it down -- Engadget
It's been just over a month and a half since Oracle first sued Google for infringing various Java-related patents in Android, and the big G's just filed its official response to the lawsuit after calling it "baseless." For the most part, it's a pretty standard answer to a patent complaint: Google says Android doesn't infringe any of Oracle's patents, and even if it does, those patents are invalid and / or unenforceable for a variety of reasons anyway, so, you know, shove it. That's basically all Google -- or any patent defendant -- needs to say in the answer, and if that was it, we'd just note it and move on with our lives. But we were struck by the factual background section, which reads to us like Google's geared up for war: it basically accuses Sun and Oracle of not playing fair when it comes to Java's open-source license situation and directly implies that parts of Android are based on code that might require a patent license.
- Daring Fireball Linked List: Apple Loses 'Cover Flow' Patent Lawsuit to Mirror Worlds
If Mirror Worlds is granted the full amount by the court, it would be one of the largest patent awards in United States history. The case was heard before Federal District Judge Leonard E. Davis in the Eastern District of Texas, a locale favored by plaintiffs in patent cases because of the generosity of the jury awards.
- Ouch! Apple dinged for $208.5 million in patent infringement case
As Mac Observer has pointed out, many of the Cover Flow and Time Machine concepts of showing files or album covers moving back and forth were in use by Apple in HyperCard stacks many years before Mirror Worlds received patents for the idea. Whether Apple will appeal the verdict or not is unknown at this time. Apple was granted a patent for Cover Flow in April, 2010, which makes this ruling even more questionable. Mirror Worlds, LLC was disbanded in 2003 due to lack of sales of its software products.
- Dan Shapiro » How to read a patent in 60 seconds
- Quite the firestorm : On a New Road
In Sun's early history, we didn't think much of patents. While there's a kernel of good sense in the reasoning for patents, the system itself has gotten goofy. Sun didn't file many patents initially. But then we got sued by IBM for violating the "RISC patent" - a patent that essentially said "if you make something simpler, it'll go faster". Seemed like a blindingly obvious notion that shouldn't have been patentable, but we got sued, and lost. Money was, of course, also an issue between Sun and Google. They were partly planning on revenue from advertising, but mostly they wanted to disrupt Apple's trajectory, and Apple's expected entry into advertising. If mobile devices take over as the computing platform for consumers, then Google's advertising channel, and the heart of its revenue, gets gutted. It doesn't take much of a crystal ball to see where Apple is going, and it's not a pretty picture for Google or anyone else.
- FutureTap » PatentGate — Apple responded, resolved amicably
- espacenet — Bibliographic data
Translate this text A method and system for creating human robots with psychic abilities, as well as enabling a human robot to access information in a time machine to predict the future accurately and realistically. The present invention provides a robot with the ability to accomplish tasks quickly and accurately without using any time. This permits a robot to cure cancer, fight a war, write software, read a book, learn to drive a car, draw a picture or solve a complex math problem in less than one second.
- Jobs Responds to Google's WebM Video Standard Announcement as Patent Questions Begin to Surface - Mac Rumors
Jobs reportedly simply responded by sending a link to a lengthy and technical blog post from an independent developer working on an open source x264 project for encoding video in the H.264 format preferred by Apple. In short, developer Jason Garrett-Glaser calls VP8/WebM "a mess" and "not ready for primetime", with Google even having declared the standard "final" despite a number of flaws already discovered in it. In addition, while appearing to be a significant upgrade over the Theora format previously preferred by Mozilla and Opera, the new format on the whole does not seem to be any better than H.264.
- Know Your Rights: H.264, patent licensing, and you -- Engadget
There's a crucial difference between "open" and "free" here. Although H.264 is an open standard, in that it was developed by a consortium of companies and anyone can make and sell an encoder or decoder, it's not free -- you've got to pay for a royalty fee to use it, and the rates are set by the MPEG-LA, which collects payments and distributes them to its members. The basic rate sheet and license terms are publicly available in summary form (PDF) on the MPEG-LA's website -- it's certainly possible for companies to strike custom deals, but for our purposes the public document offers a good baseline.